Remembering the Kanji in 60 days: day 1

Couple of months ago I decided to learn Japanese language just for fun and brain exercise. Seriously, why not?

Without much effort I get through basic character sets (Hiragana and Katakana) and a very basic vocabulary. I thought it is time to dig into native Japanese texts and boost vocabulary by immersing myself into music, web sites, newspapers, etc. Result was expected - a complete failure. I couldn't read anything without all mighty Google Translator, I even couldn't navigate websites in Japanese while trying to find simpler texts.

Kanji characters were the obvious problem: I couldn't read them, didn't know a translation, and I couldn't skip them and try to catch a general idea of a text: most of words are written in kanji.

This lead me to only one decision: I need to learn them all in a shortest period of time possible.

Why shortest? If I spend a year on this study I would most likely give up or just forget what I was learning a half-year ago.

Target is set:

• 2000 kanji characters with basic translation
• learn all in 60 days
• daily repetition with Anki
• post updates on this blog

About the last bullet: today is 17 July 2017. If you are reading this half-year after and there is no "Day 60" update on this blog - that means I failed to achieve my goal, shame on me.

I would be using "Remembering the Kanji" book authored by James W. Heisig (later called RTK). This book is well-known for great associations for each kanji (so called 'stories'). Another great thing about RTK is that kanji characters are ordered by their 'form', and not a frequency. That means similarly looking kanji characters would be close to each other.

I, personally, never liked 'stories' to remember foreign words, but order by form is ideal for a 'rush' study: it should teach to distinguish between similar kanji.

Sounds pretty challenging. Ready, set, go!